The NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN Z Review

GRID 2

Be fast, be first and be famous as the race returns in GRID 2, the sequel to the BAFTA-award winning, multi-million selling Race Driver: GRID.

Our Settings for GRID 2

At 2560x1440, all three configurations tested here today are presenting a great gaming experience. Frame rate variances were very low and average frame rates continued to stay above 120 FPS.

At 4K things change up. The Radeon R9 295X2 is out performing the GTX Titan Z by a considerable margin. While the AMD dual-GPU solution is able to average more than 90 FPS, the new NVIDIA card is hitting 70 FPS or so. That equates to a 30% advantage for AMD's flagship product.

No man I am I dedicated nvidia buyer and even I can see that this card is a huge rip off. At the price of this card you could install two titan blacks in your PC and get higher performance while saving money.

Nonsense! This thing is only about 600-700$ new now, and it wipes the floor with any titan, titan black, or titan z. The newer nVidia cards are probably better and I am satisfied with my GTX 970. But I'm curious to see what AMD is going to pull with their upcoming 300 series.

I would love a price drop but they never will until Nvidia do something, if you had a product that was better than your only competitor and you had it for half the price you would keep it at that knowing it will sell aslong as you could, AMD are still a company not as price gougey as NVIDIA but still need to turn a profit :)

Because Quadro implies a lot more than just high compute performance, at least from the driver side of things. Things like quad-buffered stereoscopic 3D in OpenGL professional applications, strict driver certification, and so forth. This is much closer to the Tesla line, except that Tesla implies no video outputs. The GeForce line is a way to get it out to the masses without making it a full-fledged Quadro part.

I can see why NVIDIA put it under their gaming brand, but that doesn't mean I think it is a good purchase, especially for gamers, when an equivalent amount of Titan Blacks (or 780 Tis if full speed, 64-bit computation isn't required) is so much cheaper. It's a pretty big commitment for the design and build quality of the Titan Z.

Though Quadro does imply the higher compute and a high level of support for professional development apps, doesn't that kind of reinforce the fact that the entire Titan lineup has never been "Gamer Friendly".

Again I think the Titan lineup should be branded Quadro or Tesla, as those are the target audiences, I mean NVIDIA may sell a fair amount of these Titan cards, but it is somewhat of a slap in the face to call these "Gamer Cards" as NVIDIA does do.

Can't be called Quadro without the Driver support and certification that cost big bucks to develop and maintain.
Quadro brand is out of the question, these GPU are mostly for number crunchers that will use them round the clock and will pay the higher costs, dew to the Titan Z's lower power usage, the Z still costs less than getting a Quadro and not using the expensive drivers, and the stock traders and scientific users don't need the certified for professional graphics use drivers. 10 or more of these things running in a stock trading boiler room, and crunching away on stock derivatives, and millisecond stock trading will save enough in power to pay the extra initial costs, but it beats having to buy the even higher priced Quadros. They can be used for gaming with gaming drivers, and they do use less power, it just takes a single gamer longer to recoup the extra costs in power savings, compared to a scientific user that may have 100 or more of these running 24/7 in a cluster.

What Nvidia sells to gamers, of even their standard gaming GPUs, is mostly paid for by the Business and scientific customers, who buy Nvidia's GPUs for GPGPU accelerators, and HPC/Supercomputing and pay the higher prices that actually fund the R&D that winds up in the consumer gaming SKUs, same goes for the enthusiasts CPUs that Intel sells, if gamers had to pay all of the R&D costs that the professional and business users cover, the actual costs of development, the gamers alone with out any other markets subsidizing the R&D, then most gamers would not be able to afford most mid range GPUs by todays standards.

Uncle Sam spends uber Butt loads of cash funding supercomputers, and Nvidia's R&D budget is funded indirectly and sometimes directly by these gigabucks projects, who's technology R&D filters down to the consumer divisions and into the consumer products. It has always been thus, for Nvidia, Intel, AMD, IBM..., gamers may let the marketing convince them that it is all about gaming, but reality is technology filters down to the consumer market, even more so for high tech than other products.

Slap in the face, let gamers pay the real costs of R&D, instead of Government, scientific, and business users, then see what a real slap is. The drug companies will buy Titan Zs buy the truckloads, of course they'll get a bulk discount, for their protean folding clusters. The Titian Z will come down in price, when the next generation of GPUs hit the market.

Quadro is a line of products for 3d design, this is their origin, not the gpgpu market.

For this exist the Testla cards.

And then they are the Geforce cards, the 3D gaming and "allforone" solution of nvidia.

Titan brand is a hybrid between Geforce cards and Tesla Cards, the Titan cards haven't the optimizations in the driver to accelerate special functions for 3D professional applications.

So the mention for the reason to not include the Titan with Quadro line is a non sense.

It's more a Tesla card, but not completely, its driver is a geforce one without optimizations, and its gpgpu capabilities are almost the same that the Tesla cards, BUT this card disables some advance feature related to run in networks of Tesla cards (is more a solution for a workstation, not to make supercomputers or nets of GPGPU systems).

Is a madness buy one of this to only gaming, but the people are sometimes very crazy.

Quadro is the professional drivers, and not so much of a hardware difference, maybe a slightly different BIOS, and some clock tweaking to minimize bit errors in the rendering, but not much difference in the hardware. That and the millions of extra man(or woman) hours that go into getting the Quadro brand's graphics drivers certified to work a flawlessly as possible with the major third party graphics software applications. the Titan Z is not too different from the GPUs utilized in the Quadro line, maybe less clock tweaking, and BIOS quality control. The Quadros probably have better power distribution/filtering circuitry and high end capacitors, for more error free operation, and extra error correction for the Gddr5 memory. Titan Z is engineered for a different market than just the gaming market, but if some gamers have the cash why not try and sell some there also, but those scientific users and stock traders will certainly spend the bucks, and recoup the higher initial costs in power bill savings.

With Quadro/Firepro/WhateverPro it's the graphics driver and graphics driver maintenance guarantee that you are buying, its like a service contract for software, it costs money to pay the software engineers, and millions of dollars are at stake, and people's jobs(Graphics professionals) are made or broken on deadlines, serous deadlines, the show must go on, Trade Show, or other that needs the graphics.

finally. someone that can understand that titan is nvidia cheap version of tesla instead of quadro. i've seen many people compare titan with quadro saying titan (well the original one) is a good card for 3d artist without the need to spend a couple of thousands of dollar for quadro. and in the end the same people commenting did not understand why nvidia want to undercut their own Quadro line up with Titan. the truth is it doesn't matter how good titan price/performance compared to quadro for people/company that need the certified driver for their pro application titan was never a choice. titan is for starter developer that interested developing their application using CUDA. once they software is fully develop they will substitute titan with tesla and have full pro support from nvidia.

No Titan Z, is not for just developers(CUDA, or others), and it's not for pro 3d graphics Artists, that do not want to starve, and need the certified graphics drivers, some of those big ad graphics take hours to run on multiple Quadros, and a few dropped pixels will ruin a rinder, and show up big time on large tradeshow graphic, or ad. The Quadro brand is not about the hardware, it is about the professional graphics drivers, that cost as much as the hardware to develop and maintain. Titan Z, note the "Z" as that is the indicator of the different branding, it can be used for gaming, but it's out there more for the scientific users, and stock traders, whose jobs, and livelihoods, do not depend on spotless rendering, and you can not photoshop or Gimp an artifact out of a fancy AA and AO, with ray tracing, 20 hour render, with fancy reflections inside of reflections, you have to rerun the render, so the Quadros, and FirePros are worth every red cent for those costly drivers, that and ECC memory. Titan Z is for number crunching, and lower power consuming 24/7 use, it can be used for gaming, with installed gaming drivers, but is for a different market segment than pro graphics or just gaming alone. they are not undercutting Quadro, Quadro is the pro drivers! Titan Z is for scientists and stock traders, and such, Gaming is an afterthought for Titan Z, if you can afford the bucks up front, if you are running 10 or more of these Titan Z cards, the power savings will pay for the extra cost over their usable lifetime, at 24/7 use.

Pro graphics users work on deadlines, just like news reporters, miss too many deadlines because of a bad render, and find another way to make a living PDQ!

With all the caveats to the Titan Z I can't help but be impressed with the engineering of this card. Single fan cooling config and quiet performance with two gpu cores makes me as impressed as I was seeing all those memory lanes on a single PCB with the 295x2.

I suppose if you're spending this amount of money on a PC what's an extra £150 or so for a fc waterblock.

heat output and temperatures can vary I guess. However is it unfortunate that even when AMD has a superior product they still wont sell as many as nvidia at 2x the price. Incompetence or just bad luck.

For $3000 card (cost twice as much as R9 295X2)but for most benchmark, it lose to R9 295X2 ? i can say GTX TITAN-Z is a failure for gaming card, but for workstation ? i hope Pc perspective will try to benchmark this against $3000 Quadro Cards on 3D application.

this article lacks overclocking capability of the TitanZ, but hey still good to finaly see some benchs, Nvidia handled the defeat of TitanZ poorly, they could have just supplied samples instead of this idiotic reaction they had.
i hope they bring a 790 out as ryan said without double P, but cut the price, so that AMD drops too and have some affordable bi-gpu this season.

I would compare this Titan Z to 2x780ti and 1 Tesla K40. Do you know how many Tflops is the peak double precision floating point and peak single precision floating point is on the Z? Is the GDDR5 capable of ECC? If this thing beats out a tesla K40 then $3000 is much cheaper than a $4000 K40 that is capable of no gaming or a K6000 that can only game as much as a 780.

I'm always at a loss for the "overclock them and they will win" statements. no Nv card runs in game at its baseclock. they all boost...all of them. so this isn't 780Ti sli @ 876Mhz vs 295X2 @ 1018Mhz. more likely 780Ti sli @ 1000Mhz vs 295X2 @1018.

and for all the 295X2 is hot as hell folks...the 780Ti sli will be 10C hotter at those clocks.

TLDR: the cards (290X/780Ti) are clock for clock equals and the 290X2 is the fastest single graphics card...

I'd like to see the benchmarks run after the cards are warmed and the clocks have settled. nVidia cards can maintain pretty high boosts for a minute or two, but tend to drop off pretty substantially after that until the temps settle.

i wish we could all stop arguing about the titan line. it is true that there is people who would benefit from this inbetweener, and that it would be more suited under for instance the tessla line.
but nvidia made the choice to put this sub line under its gaming line, and actively market it at gamers, which means that this is how they should be judged.

While the DirectX 11 performance comparison can be appreciated, I think we would also like to see more OpenGL comparisons for balance sake. AMD has been known not to support OpenGL standards, and a consumer would want to know that a card will run the games they wish to play. This is also important for DirectX 9 games which many of the most popular games are still using that.

When testing games like Crysis 3 and others could you also post the settings so we know if any NVidia specific features such as tessellation or PhysX are enabled.

I do not favor one brand over another, but currently choose NVidia cards because they support features in the games I want to play while AMD does not at this time.

On the other hand, if I want a card for mining purposes I would definitely choose an AMD card, so maybe you should cover that kind of performance too. I am sure it is VERY important to some consumers to know that AMD is the CLEAR winner in this category of use in consumer grade cards.

I appreciate your testing methods, but they could still use some improvements by covering a wider range of uses and features each manufacturer provides.

When you test games like Skyrim also, you should perhaps mod the game (with the top graphical mods) the way most users still playing it would so you can ascertain performance in that scenario rather than the vanilla game which few if any are still playing it in that form.

Well still showing bias regardless. Microsoft stopped giving DX9 library support about 3 years ago, nobody less than the 10% of games released uses DX9, cause by the time you push the DX9 to the limits, you will be far more CPU bound than GPU bound thanks to the terrible overhead this API has. There are a couple of games that have a DX9 fallback code, but its only usefull if you don't have DX11/DX10 capable hardware or don't have the performance to run it, so there is no point caring much about DX9, cause today's hardware is fast enough to run any DX9 game, heck even was able to max STALKER with the Complete Mod which uses DX9 and is one of the most demanding DX9 applications ever, and ran over 65fps most of the time with my GTX 560M. AMD with the latest driver supports OpenGL 4.4 which is no problem, they are slower to adapt OpenGL than nVidia, but is as capable. Crysis 3 has Tessellation on by default and you can even turn it off manually if you want, but there is no point disabling it specially when the game is playable on most high end hardware with no issues. PhysX is a mimick which eventually will die as only one game or two that uses it are released every year or every two years may be. I love the technology but seeing how much underutilized went, I ended off selling my secondary GTX 650 that I had for PhysX processing.

Two OC'd Titan Blacks if you need compute. Two OC'd 780 ti s for gaming. Check out the inno ichill 780 ti which runs OC in the high 50s on AIR!!! AMD can only dream with their power hungry space heaters. Titan Z is for the I don't care what it costs crowd and Nvidia has been pretty good holding that segment.

I don't like AMD going outside the power specifications, but that is the only thing that really makes the product make any sense. Nvidia stayed within the 375 W limit, so they have lower performance than the 780Ti in SLI. Given the high price, there isn't much of a reason for this card to exist.

These dual gpu cards seem to really only be for marketing, rather than a real product. AMD made dual gpus closer to a real product by actually enabling full speed by using water cooling. It still doesn't make much sense (higher price for same performance) unless you are building a space constrained system. The Titan Z fails at being a marketing/publicity stunt since it obviously can not compete with the 295x2 in performance. AMD and Nvidia want to stay in the public consciousness, even when they do not have a (real) new product to release. These cards will be super low production volume, but they obviously generate a lot of publicity. Since AMD beat them to market with the 295x2, they do not want any publicity, since this has turned to negative publicity.

These dual gpu cards will not really make sense until they actually connect the gpus together to allow them to share memory and act more like a single gpu. To share memory, they need really high bandwidth interconnect (~100 GB/s), which is probably doable between chips so close together. I have been wondering if they could just shrink the memory controller and use the pins for interconnect instead, or even make them programmable to allow the same chip so be used in a single gpu card with full width memory interface or in a multi-gpu card with narrower memory interface. This would also allow use of less memory. Designing and producing such a design may not be feasible right now due to the low volume nature of the super high-end gpu market though. I don't think it is that useful for the compute market due the way compute gpus are being used (parallel independent task).

So i am glad i built my dream machine with 3 gtx blacks that cost me as 1 z. i know it is overpriced, compared to 780ti, which is also overpriced, but running them underwater gave me huge potential for oc and smooth 4k. it was just a dream machine that i don't plan to swap for the forthcoming years. To my opinion, graphic cards should not be priced more than 400$ i don't believe there is no room for profit even for the z if this was the price target.. anyway, just an opinion.

They are just about equal while the 780Ti's are running at 876Mhz. Too bad you can easily get cards that run 1300 or even 1400 on water. Just imagine the performance gap they would have with +50% clockspeed on the nvidia cards :D What a joke

Note: FLOPS are primarily important to people mining for Bitcoins or for protein folding. It means very little in the way of gaming.

With that being said, I think the only way that the TITAN-Z would pull ahead of other SLI/Crossfire setups is at 8K resolutions because of its immense 12GB of VRAM and 768-bit bus. Even then, I'm not sure that the ROPs, shaders and texture procs on the TITAN-Z would be able to keep up with that resolution.

I honestly think these cards' target audience is those planning on mining, and that's why they justify the exorbitant price tag despite the lackluster gaming performance but with a notable increase in teraFLOPS performance.

I've seen a bunch of vendors dropping the price significantly on the TitanZ, Alienware had a TitanZ half off promotion and now CyberPower is giving 500.00 off the price. Has this made this card a better value? Trying to price a new system, have about 4g to spend. I do not want to put it together myself or support it, I am laaaaaazy.